I’ve mentioned it in weekly threads before but I’ve started taking wheel pottery classes. It’s very nice to just hang out with some clay.

I brought earplugs this week and it was way less overwhelming than previous weeks. I haven’t gotten used to being out in public again!

Oh no I missed this.

I have taken my 3d printed sluice out for use. I dug around in a river a bit, I think I picked bad spots as despite finding many indicator stones I only found 1 sapph and a handful of zircons (although one might be cutting quality). However!

There’s gold in them thar plateau!

First time finding it, pretty neat. Tiny amount though.

We just had some rain so it’s running a bit high. Gonna be a little busy for the next while launching a website and end of year stuff but I’ll be sneaking back out there as often as I can derilict my duties.

Tell us about a personal project, hobby, side thing, activity that you’ve been getting into lately

Ive actually had to scale back a lot of hobbies due to time constraints. But I have been working on building a portfolio since i am concerned about my employment long term. Havent made as much progress as i would like but I’ve been trying to get back onto a stricter schedule so i can work on it a little bit each day.

//

Unrelated but had to say goodbye to one of our dogs today. She had been part of the family for 12 years. Shits rough.

Still working on my music mostly. I’ve gotten really into playing the trumpet lately but my main instrument is still the guitar. I’m currently learning some 90s rock songs, like Hallelujah by Jeff Buckley.

I’m trying to turn my web dev hobby/education into a freelance career. I have a business site with a few demo sites up and everything.

I have been wanting to make my niche mostly “leftist businesses” but I won’t turn down a lib or whatever just as long as it’s not like a hate site. I’m trying to get some feelers out into the community more now due to the political climate shift after this last election. I just really wanna try and help any marginalized group for any activist projects they might be starting. I have a bit of an advantage in that regard because I’m a bit known for being about and loud leftist in a severely conservative stronghold of a city. I just need to keep networking.

I am writing a go program which I will be releasing as FOSS soon. I don’t think I can share much about that without doxing myself, but that has been fun and I think it will be useful to some people i know. I got Warcraft 2 battle chest running through lutris with my old iso. Playing through the orc campaign right now and I am trying hard not to get pulled into modding yet. All of this vintage gaming is causing some wrist strain though lol. Thank goodness for modern control schemes!

I will be summoning some seitan and other holiday recipes so that I have some more practice before we have some carnists (and others) over. I like to cook, but the holiday season adds some anxiety to that because I feel like I need to prove that my food is just as good as others.

Reading theory, finally. This post inspired me: https://lemmy.ml/post/22417306

Tell us about a personal project, hobby, side thing, activity that you’ve been getting into lately.

I have been chomping at the bit while trying to stay patient and positive during my recovery period. PT is being slow about getting me in and my stir-craziness is starting to get the better of me. At the same time though I’m grateful that things are the way they are. I know there are many people worse off than I am and my heart goes out to them. Limitations suck.

I spent the last week slowly but surely cleaning up the back yard and removing/burning overgrown shrubs (WHY ARENT YOU YAUPON?!?!?!?) so that our dogs have more space to run and play and potty. The weather has been crappy and rainy which sucks for most things but worked out perfectly for burning brush. Silver lining, or something.

Besides that life has been pretty standard. I’ve been trying desperately to get back to reading my books but it seems like distractions continually pop up and prevent me from “getting in the zone” where all I want to do is bury myself in a book. This week’s priority is to do more reading, distraction be damned!

been just preposterously busy with work as i just got kind of thrust into a new role as a sysadmin for which i am entirely unqualified, lol. but! in order to swim rather than sink i’m now learning Powershell, which will hopefully be useful long-term. we’re also in a season of needing a lot of work on our home; my wife and i just finished rebuilding a fence that blew over in a windstorm, and then as we were preparing for a flooring project we found mold in some drywall that we’ve had to isolate and will need to mitigate, and just this morning we had someone out to do a yearly furnace check and we need a new actuator in the furnace. hopefully by the time this is all done i’ll both know powershell and also be a functional handyman, ha! which is something i never had any interest in before.

outside of work and home repair, i’m trying to start a habit of yoga in addition to my meditation practice, but that’s been tough because the room i usually do yoga in is the room that closed off due to the mold remediation! lol/sob.

also just trying to stay on top of cooking. my wife and i make a giant weekly pot of Nigerian style jollof rice, and that’s been a great relief so we don’t need to figure out lunches for the first few days of the week.

so, boring life stuff but busy. never a dull moment.

I have all the equipment to start kratky hydro like Frosty and now NaevaTheRat but I haven’t really gotten started. To be honest I think my new project has been my personal health, I was more tired than usual and having headaches and this caused me to actually go to the doctor for the first time in a few years. They were of course extremely unhelpful so I downloaded a medical textbook from Anna’s archive https://annas-archive.org/md5/b99067cc9d12841cc79f85ae6c62df76 and read about diagnosis and treatment and then went to aliexpress and bought medical equipment. I’ve learned I had high blood pressure so I’ve been taking steps to change that dynamic, mostly by increasing the amount of greens I eat by a lot, exercising every day and trying to get less mad at my job and its been working. Now I am trying to figure out why I’m not sleeping well and doing daily monitoring. I think I have OSA so I’m going to try to lose 10 lbs (which is apparently much harder than I thought, a few years ago I lost 36 kilo with major life style change but losing 4 is taking forever) and research the mouth guards. There is so much misinformation and bullshit though it is hard to know though lol.